Under a minute later, if the birds are close enough to spot it, they'll see the large bronze doors of a church-like building on the grounds start to glow around the frame. 

- then the doors themselves vanish, replaced by a window or portal to somewhere else entirely, and two humans riding white quadrupeds pile through. 

One of the birds is close enough to spot it! It can go on the growing list of Really Confusing Things. Their minds are confused - frustrated - fascinated - scared - tracking something...

- they're coming up on their time limit and ought to head out of the city. They flock together and do this, heading for dense forest at least a couple of miles out.

Oh no not so fast. 

Van is still dazed from the Gate, and Herald-Mage Savil is pretty tired, but she's also worked with the Web extensively, and she can use it to boost her Gift, stretching her mind out and out...

A force-net trap snaps into place around one of the birds, bringing it plummeting toward the earth. 

Vanyel, teeth gritted, hangs onto Yfandes' back as she breaks into a gallop, racing after the captured air-elemental-bird or whatever in all hells it is. 

The other birds scatter and try to fly farther up and away!

The captured one is SO PANICKED.

Less than a minute later, one of the white quadrupeds reaches the spot where it's fallen, landing in a pile of trash just outside the inner Palace walls. 

A human with white-streaked dark head hair and no face hair leaps down, landing with a stagger and making a pained sound. He clamps down tighter shields over the - whatever it is - Vanyel has a lot more experience working with summoned elementals than Kilchas or Sandra and that doesn't feel like an air-elemental at all, or any kind of spirit for that matter, though he sees how they mistook it for one...

:Who sent you: he demands, coldly, only a little bit of the acid-like pain in his skull leaking through in the Mindspeech overtones. 

- being directly addressed is calming, somehow. The mind-piloting-bird knows what to do about that, which is of course to categorically refuse to answer. 

It's still counting something in the back of its mind. 

(Elsewhere in Haven, a man in the uniform of a Palace gardener, with a low-level mage-gift that he's been successfully concealing for the past six years, drops his work with a stammered apology about feeling unwell to his colleague, and flees back to the servant quarters. 

Digging frantically in his trunk, he wrenches out a wrapped object. Unwraps it. He hasn't used the mage-artifact ever before and it's going to set off an alarm but that's fine, the Heralds seem to be very busy and ten minutes from now he'll be on his way out of the city. 

He sends a short message using the code-page concealed between two other stuck pages of a book of ballads. Then breaks the artifact by stamping on it, throws the broken pieces into the fireplace, and gets a head start on fleeing.)

- what now. Leareth is now even more confused. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like events are going to wait for him.

He barks more orders, instructing other mages to divvy up watching the newly-arrived creatures now under attack from the Heralds in Haven, and then starts readying a small group to Gate across the mountains. 

:Did Karse send you: 

Vanyel, not expecting an answer in words, probes the not-elemental's mind as deeply as he can in hopes of getting an answer. 

- it's confused again, that the enemy would capture it without knowing what it was. It thinks Karse might be an enemy-name, or maybe a human-name, it's not an ally-name obviously.

(Tracking time, in the background...)

Huh. Doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't sent by Karse, but - Vanyel is noticing that he's confused, and he should probably pay attention to that fact.

What's it counting towards...?  

He wants to Truth Spell the being, he doesn't know if it'll work but if he can sense its mind then probably? But first he wants it somewhere its comrades can't dive-bomb him to rescue it. It's currently very thoroughly trapped in a force-net but if it has magic that's not enough to make picking it up safe. 

Vanyel taps a node, concentrates, and boosts his Thoughtsensing, delivering a carefully calibrated but very hard mental THWAP that should, if he does it right, stun the creature without killing it outright. 

The bird is unconscious. 

(The other birds have flown away to demorph in the forest. They're not equipped for a rescue operation; they remorph and fly north.)

Vanyel scoops up the unconscious bird-mind-not-elemental-thing with magic, and hauls it back to the Palace, trying his best to ignore the headache. 

The bird will wake up about half a candlemark later in a stone room with no windows and a locked door, and Vanyel sitting on a stool nursing a cup of willowbark tea. 

(His aunt is out past the city walls now, trying to catch up with the rest, but they're quickly flying out of her range.) 

The mind-controlling-the-bird consults its internal computer for the time. Feels - relieved, and also sad, and much less scared. 

It looks around at the room briefly, contemplating avenues of suicide. Maybe if it flew at the wall very hard.

Vanyel is confused, again, but he ignores it for the moment. He concentrates on the rhyme that summons the vrondi, pushing his energy into it until they settle deeper on the mind in question. 

:Tell me where you come from: he says, hoping that Mindspeech-concepts translate well enough for the creature to get the gist of the question; he can sense its thoughts but they're hard for him to interpret.

- the magic pulls to its mind an image of a vast purple field and a vast open red-gold sky -

- and it's so horrified, what could possibly do that, it checks briefly whether the others are out of range so it could warn them - they are, and it can't - and then flies at the wall, stretching out its neck in its best guess of the most dangerous posture to hit it at.

Vanyel, forewarned by the horrified reaction and decision in its thoughts, reacts instantly; he flings up a springy barrier so that it bounces off, still injuring its neck somewhat but not lethally so, and then he pins it in another force-net. 

Ugh. Can he make it not do that in any way other than constantly trapping it? He could attempt a compulsion-binding of some kind but he's never done that before and might mess it up even worse in the process. 

That doesn't look like an elemental plane at all. Also doesn't look like Karse. Vanyel is so confused right now. 

...And also starting to feel guilty and upset, because it seems a lot like this isn't a spy sent by Karse. 

:Why did you come here?: he asks it, still with the force of a coercive Truth Spell behind the Mindspeech-word-concepts.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh war vacuum explosions ships destruction enemy Earth - not Earth, though it still has humans, somehow, humans who can - how - 

It tries a different wall and runs into the force-net.

Nope, still pinned in a force-barrier. 

Vanyel doesn't recognize half the images/concepts there, but all of it looks horrible! The explosions, is that maybe the war in Karse seen from another plane– No. He stops himself. He can recognize when he's trying too hard to cram something confusing into a framework where it'll make sense, and - he needs to stop, back off, notice that in fact this makes no sense. 

Not Karse. A war, though, somewhere else. Earth? Somewhere with people, humans, but the bird-mind-thing is surprised to be here instead. 

...other worlds? 

It's too much to absorb at once, and also the creature's panic is buffeting at his Receptive Empathy and it hurts. 

This is probably a bad idea, but Yfandes is cut off by the Work Room shields and not there to tell him off, so Vanyel gets down from the stool and kneels and picks up the bird in his hands. Physical contact lets him push harder with his Empathy, trying to soothe it. 

:I'm sorry: he sends. :I - didn't mean to hurt you - we thought you were a spy from the place we're fighting. But I don't think you're our enemy. I think you're - very lost... Shhh, it's all right, I'm not going to harm you: 

The bird is - confused, again, mixed in with a great deal of condescension - 

<I am not your enemy> it says curtly after a moment. <However, you are a tool in the hands of my enemies, and whatever you are doing to my head could aid them, if you learned anything that mattered. Please stop interfering.> 

Weird. That's not even Mindspeech, it's...something else entirely... 

:It would help if I knew who your enemy was: he sends. :Tell me who was attacking you: 

<I am not authorized to do that. If you let me go I could seek authorization to do that.>

:If I let you go then I'm aware you are absolutely not going to come back and tell us what in all hells is going on: Vanyel sighs. :Look, if some sort of weird magical entities showed up and started spying on your country, you'd want to know what they were up to just as badly. Who is your enemy?: 

This time, instead of expecting the creature to answer, he probes its thoughts directly again. Hard enough that it's probably going to notice, but it's not like it hasn't already noticed he's using a second-stage Truth Spell.